The Challenge of Being Evil in Games

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State of Play: Good? Bad? You're the guy with the gun.

By Rus McLaughlin

A ridiculous number of games nowadays track your behavior to the nearest inch. It started with RPGs and has since migrated to sandbox games, shooters, platformers, you name it. Even Need for Speed Shift tailors challenges based on your recklessness. Maybe they call it a morality system, or reputation, or notoriety, or maybe your character's eyes just start glowing red after you behead your third orphan. Whatever the tag, you've got to be really careful or really careless about everything you do, because odds are it's going to change the game you're playing, and maybe not in ways you want. Or maybe not in all the ways it should.

Personally, I always take the high road. Not because I'm such a spectacularly upstanding citizen, but because I want the baseline experience on my first playthrough, and I don't always have the time or inclination for a second run. Sure, there are lapses. Sure, I rampage through the occasional church with a minigun I've nicknamed "Bunny" to see what happens. Then I go back to a prior save and erase those deviations.

Recently, my Xbox 360 died and I had to get a new system. A bad break? Maybe. Now screwy Microsoft hardware had gifted me with the ultimate blank slate. I could literally start from scratch, at the gaming equivalent of Biblical innocence. And this time, I planned to stick a butcher knife in Karma's face. Just to see how bad the bad can get in a video game.

This is me, killing someone's cow.

I started with Red Dead Redemption, a game I'd already finished as a paragon of virtue. Going back to the Old West as a walking affront to God and man, I quickly found out just how much Red Dead forces you to play nice. Shooting anything from a man to a cow during the first twenty minutes instantly kicks you to a Mission Failed roadblock. Okay, so that's mostly tutorial time, and it won't do from a design perspective to let players ice the NPCs who dole out missions. Fair enough. But if you're still bad to the bone once the game opens up to a full sandbox experience, it won't be long before your experience begins to suck.

Constant interruptions from lawmen come to claim the price on your head is annoying, if expected after you start dropping bystanders, but once you become the most wanted man in America, you're saddled with the worst horse in the game. Supplies cost more for outlaws -- you can't just rob goods from a store -- and completing any given mission raises your honor level when you're trying like hell to keep it in the cellar. You have to depopulate a few towns to make up for advancing the game.

Thank goodness Fable II let me rob goods from stores, kill the shopkeeper and reopen under new management. That's in addition to slaughtering everyone I met and cheating on my virtual wives with virtual whores. By contrast, Mass Effect mainly allowed me to be a colossal jerk. Mass Effect 2 and its loyalty missions in particular offered more opportunities for pointless bloodshed. Which I naturally took.

The problem was, despite my callous and gratuitously cruel nature, the games kept bringing me back around to saving my family, or the world, or the universe. Compare that to the good ol' days of terrorizing the peasantry as a vampire in Oblivion, or breaking the big taboo of killing children back when Fallout was an isometric RPG. Bethesda made real sure you couldn't harm a single kid when they took over with Fallout 3, even if you'd just hilariously vaporized granny and stolen her violin.

Then there were side missions where an invisible hand intervened between my desires and the writers' intentions. While playing Red Dead, a pimp demanded $200 from me if I wanted him to stop beating a hooker and allow her to run away to a convent. I wanted to save myself $200, put two bullets in his beady little eyes, and congratulate myself on my thriftiness. Mission Failed. Why? Because the game wanted me to pay him off, find out he'd killed her anyway a few days later, then -- and only then -- gun him down in the name of justice.

Is it wrong to pay strippers to dance on you?

Get the sense you're supposed to be the good guy? Well, that's because you are.

You can hear it in our terminology when talking about games with morality. There's a "true" ending (that's the one you get if you're Mr. Nicey-Nice), the "neutral" ending (if you've got a spine like marshmallow) and the "bad" ending, where your accumulated misdeeds plunge the world into ultimate darkness. Which is presented as wrong, even though the game itself allowed, if not outright encouraged you to give in to the dark side, and then fully enabled your reign of evil. Bit of a mixed message there.

Moreover, it's generally tougher being bad. Some games throw additional enemies at you. Some cut off avenues you could've taken or drop advantages you could've used. Some short-change you on resources. Some, like Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, combine a few of these deterrents until you voluntarily grit your teeth and behave yourself instead of, say, bulling your way through a few conversations by abusing your Jedi powers. And to reinforce the notion the "good" ending from the first game is always canon that plays into the story of the sequel. That's rather irritating, given how much time I spent in Infamous becoming infamous. I'm sure that'll zero out when I crank up Infamous 2.

So you might start to wonder what the point is to a morality system in the first place.